"Reptiles, mince pices, and artificial teeth," plus a familiar lament

Here are some interesting excerpts from a 140-year-old newspaper article about the state of the fledgling postal system in the United Kingdom. Specifically, this is from the August 22, 1879, issue of The Standard of London, England.

• The serious illness of Sir Rowland Hill, the founder of the penny postage system, imparts and unusual degree of interest to the Annual Report of the POSTMASTER GENERAL, which was issued yesterday. The Report bears witness to the ever-increasing commercial activity of the United Kingdom.
• England must be a very different place now from what it was a century and a half ago, when the post ran only three times a week between Edinburgh and London, and the mail-bag from the Metropolis on one occasion contained only a single letter. It is barely forty years since the penny post came into operation, and in the last year of the higher rate the number of letters delivered in the United Kingdom was eighty-three millions, including nearly seven millions of franks.
• A single firm in London is known to received three thousand letters daily.
• Men are pursued from morning to night by letters and telegrams, and the work of the day may be upset by a message received in the evening. The strain is never taken off, the arrangements never seem final. Formerly there was a clear interval between post and post, a period of calm which could not be interrupted. Now it is only during a few hours in the night that there is immunity from some startling telegram. ... Life subject to these influences is apt to be hurried and overstrained. A sea voyage is perhaps the surest way of escape.
• Let a man allow himself to be entangled in this net and he exposes himself to the risk of being talked at from all points of the compass.
• There are other strange things in respect to the postal service, odd matters in transitu, such as "wild animals," reptiles, mince pies, and artificial teeth. Letters without any address amount in one year to more than twenty thousand, and letters with very odd addresses continue to abound.
• There were more than five milllions of undelivered letters last year, while the undelivered post-cards, book packets, and newspapers exceeded four millions. Half a million letters could neither be delivered nor returned to the senders.
• In the United Kingdom the Post Office has developed into a vast institution, employing 46,000 persons, of whom one-fourth are engaged exclusively on Telegraph work.
• In the United Kingdom there are now nearly 26,000 receptacles for letters, London alone having nearly 2000.
• The British postal system is one of which the Kingdom may be proud. ... A single penny — or even a half-penny — sets the machine in motion, and the postman is the servant of everybody.

Trash blowing in the wind

In the midst of my grumpy Sunday of errand-running, I found myself at one point walking through a swirl of sidewalk trash at the West Manchester Town Center. So I stopped and started picking it up, stuffing it all into a plastic bag (grrrr) that was also part of the wind-blown refuse.

Sometimes I imagine I'll just start walking the Earth, like Caine in Kung Fu or David Banner in The Incredible Hulk, only I'll be picking up roadside trash the whole way. Or maybe it's more realistic if that's just something I do on weekends, given that I have no martial arts or gamma radiation powers. And also that I still need a paycheck.

Anyway, one of the pieces of trash I picked up was this colorful shopping list. I decided to stuff it into my back pocket rather than into the trash bag, because my ephemera archaeologist/sociologist instincts outweighed my immediate desire to throw it in the trash.

We see that someone used multiple pen colors to document their need for, among other things, hot dogs, cleaning supplies, granola bars, Fritos, conditioner, Honeycomb cereal (which I didn't even think was still sold) and tea tree oil.

And now that it's been properly documented, it can go into the trash. And then off to the landfill or incinerator, alongside all those things we used to recycle. Sigh.

Grumpy Sunday thoughts on the plague of cars

This infographic (by Pictograph Corporation) appears within 1943's An Introduction to Sociology and Social Problems (second edition) by Deborah MacLurg Jensen, and it serves as a good ephemeral jumping off point for a post about cars and walkable communities. It shows the ways that automobiles changed life in the United States. Ostensibly, it's supposed to be a pro-automobile illustration but, especially with hindsight, it makes it clear how cars pushed our communities, neighborhoods, schools and public services apart, making cars fully mandatory for existence within society.

I'm crankier than usual about cars today for a couple reasons. First, I had to leave the house on three separate occasions within seven hours to run automobile errands, which is horribly inefficient and no help for our climate. Second, I came across this Atlas Obscura post on Facebook this morning:

To which my response was essentially:

WHY?!?! Cities weren't even built for cars until the last 100 years and they probably never should have been in the first place. There should be no entitlement to roads going everywhere and cars parking everywhere. What's wrong with a few car-free neighborhoods? Or at least off-site parking?

Longtime reader(s) know that walkable communities are not a new theme or dream here on Papergreat. If you want to dive further into this topic and don't have a James Howard Kunstler book handy, here are some past posts:

• Saturday's postcard: Fiskargränd in Visby, Sweden
• Saturday's postcard: Odense, Møntestræde
• Saturday's postcards: Black-and-white scenes from the past
• Saturday's postcards: Take a holiday in Spain
• Saturday's postcards: An alley in France and an asylum in Lancaster
• Super Tuesday: Great non-political reads & some walkable streets
• Wonderful walkable streets on Instagram
• Trincat Street and castle ruins in Les Baux, France
• 1920s postcards: A walkable street and an adventurous path

Also, as CGI Princess Leia might say, there was hope that I stumbled into on another front this morning. Specifically, I discovered a Curbed article titled "Could a car-free, Dutch-style city work in Colorado?" It was written by Megan Barber and published last month. Here's an excerpt:

"[There would be] no traditional city grid. Instead the plan uses Dutch easement and platting standards as a model, envisioning an 80-person-per acre average density that will feel far lower thanks to parks, public squares, and short distances to the countryside outside of town. Each street will prioritize cycling and pedestrians while parking lots will only be built at the edge of the city."

You should read the full article for more groovy details. Clearly, this project will cost a ton of money. And I have serious upfront concerns that this kind of community wouldn't be available to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Still, I think it should be encouraged. We can learn things from each experiment like this and hopefully build a future world where we're much less dependent on cars. (Assuming we have a planet left for that future.)

Book cover: "Space Flight" (1959)

• Title: Space Flight
• Subtitle: "The Coming Exploration of the Universe"
• Author: Lester del Rey (1915-1993)
• Illustrator: John Polgreen (1910-1970)
• Publisher: Golden Press (The Golden Library of Knowledge)
• Publication year: 1959 (material originally copyright 1957 and 1958 by General Mills)
• Original price: 50 cents in the United States; 65 cents in Canada
• Pages: 56
• Format: Hardcover
• Provenance: Written on the title page: R.J. Fasnacht, 29 Lincoln Drive, Hanover, Pennsylvania. (I found a Richard J. Fasnacht of Hanover who lived from 1932 to 2009. That's possibly a match.)
• First sentence: The Space Age began on October 4, 1958, when the first artificial satellite — Sputnik I — was successfully launched.
• Last sentences: Perhaps there is really no end to space flight. But there is a beginning, and that has already been made.
• Random sentence from middle: Being a spaceman will require the highest possible combination of physical and mental abilities, as well as courage.
• Prescient section from the middle: Men may even build small stations further out to televise a full color picture of the whole hemisphere of Earth to the surface, where it could be studied in detail. Hurricanes beginning out in the Atlantic could be spotted in time to warn all ships. Such storms could be followed from hour to hour and warnings issued to cities in their path. Perhaps in time, as more is learned about weather, some way could be found to break up such storms before they could move inland or reach their full fury.
• Gender equity analysis: For that era, Lester del Rey is about as progressive as one might have hoped, perhaps in a backhanded way, though. Here's an interesting excerpt:
  

  

  "In the future, most boys will dream about going into space. The idea of being a spaceman will attract young people just as many now want to become airplane pilots. Girls will also want to go out into the Space Service. They will probably do at least as well as men; for long and difficult trips, women may be preferred, since it has been proved that they are able to stand monotony better than men. Some girls may become pilots. The word spacemen must be used to mean either boys or girls, with no difference in the type of job they will do."

• What others are saying: In an excellent 2011 post on Riding with Robots, Bill Dunford states:
  

  "The book itself is beautiful, and its content is an intriguing mix. Naive and wildly speculative on the one hand, hopeful and prescient on the other. It’s easy to smile at the blank spaces on the pictures of the planets and at the predictions the author got wrong. But my eyes widened at some of the things he nailed — a lot of it is spot on. Likewise, the book stirred a mixture of feelings about the state of space exploration today. We have accomplished so much of what the author hoped, and so much is still in progress ... or remains a dream even all these decades later."

  Indeed, is space colonization, funded by the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, our only or best hope against the coming catastrophe of global climate change?

Bonus interior illustration

Saturday's postcards: Sri Lankan mosque & historic home in Arkansas

First up is this unused postcard that was printed in the United States and published by Ceylon Pictorials. Designated as CP-62, the caption on the back indicates that the building is "Mohammedan Mosque" in Colombo, Ceylon.

Ceylon became the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka in 1972 and is home today to nearly 22 million people of many cultures and ethnicities. Buddhists comprise 70 percent of the population, according to Wikipedia, while "Islam is the third most dominant religion in the country, having first been brought to the island by Arab traders over the course of many centuries, starting around the 7th century CE."

Colombo is the largest city in Sri Lanka, in terms of population. This "Mohammedan Mosque" is today, in English, known as the Dawatagaha Jumma Masjid or Dewatagaha Mosque. The mosque, if I have my facts straight, is considered part of the Cinnamon Gardens neighborhood of the city.

According to lankabhumi.org, "Dewatagaha Mosque in Lipton's Circus, Colombo, has become a byword in every Muslim home, and no Muslim passes the shrine of the saint without paying his respects. The 150-year-old shrine [is] the resting-place of the Muslim saint, His Holiness Seyedina as-Sheikh Usman Siddique Ibn Ahdurrahman, who visited Ceylon from Arafat, Arabia ... and later resided in what was later known as Cinnamon Gardens."

A 2017 review on TripAdvisor states: "The Dewatagaha mosque is one of the prominent mosques in Colombo. It's huge and white, the architecture is lovely and beautiful, and we learnt that the mosque is about 200 years old. Its lovely exterior is almost an iconic part of the architecture in the city center in Colombo."

* * *

Switching gears to Arkansas in the United States, this is a real photo postcard from K.C. Studio in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The stamp box on the back, per playle.com, indicates that it's an EKC card published between 1930 and 1950. (The postcard has never been used.)

Pictured is the home of comedian Bob Burns (1890-1956) in Van Buren, Arkansas. Burns was known for radio shows, movies, a folksy newspaper column ("Well, I'll Tell You") and, perhaps most famously, the word "bazooka." For him, it was a handheld music instrument that functioned like a crude trombone. The name was appropriated in World War II and became the iconic nickname for a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.

The Bob Burns House at 821 Jefferson Street in Van Buren was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. According to its application for that honor, it was "built in 1885 by Alex Lacy, a Van Burn merchant. It was a white frame two-story Victorian style home. The original floor plan had three rooms downstairs and three rooms upstairs separated by [a] hallway."

Very obscure Manning-Sanders novel: "Mermaid's Mirror"

I've wavered at times over the years regarding what I believe to be the most rare, hard-to-find work by Ruth Manning-Sanders. These days, I believe it's her 1935 novel Mermaid's Mirror, which was published by Cassell & Co. For a while, I wasn't even sure if it was real, because it didn't show up on all of her online bibliographies. I have never seen it for sale on Amazon, eBay or AbeBooks. And I've never seen an online image of the book or its cover. WorldCat says it's held at four libraries overseas, including Oxford. (WorldCat also says it's at two school libraries in Texas, but I'm pretty sure those are false positives.)

I have also never found a summary or review of the book, which is odd.

All I have is this Cassell advertisement, which appears in the June 9 and June 16, 1935, editions of The Observer of London.

"A deftly-written novel of strange happenings on the Cornish Coast." That pretty much just makes me want to find this book even more.

Soviet-era magazine cartoons

Today we're again delving into the December 1974 issue of Sputnik, which, as I wrote in November 2017, "was essentially the Soviet Union's version of Reader's Digest and was primarily intended for Western readers." These are some single-panel cartoons from a feature titled "In a Lighter Vein." The funnies are from the newspapers Sovietskaya, Estonia, Nedelya and the magazine Ogonyok.

1979 Star Wars toy ads

Pictured above is a page from a 16-page staplebound pamphlet published by Kenner Products in 1979 — 40 years ago! — to advertise the company's Star Wars toys. The front of the pamphlet is shown at right, with Darth Titan looming in the background.

This was about the same year my interest in these toys began to blossom. I suspect I had a similar arc to many American boys that age in that era. I probably had 8-to-10 Star Wars figures in the late 1970s when we were living in Clayton, New Jersey. They got pretty beat up from playing in the dirt, on the curb, on the wooden jungle gym and on the front porch, where they would take tumbles into the bushes. I also remember having a Kenner landspeeder and I think, at one point, the TIE fighter with the wings that popped off. I also remember being excited to send away for the Star Wars Collector's Action Stand, although I thought it was pretty underwhelming when it arrived.

Other than action figures (typically bought at drug stores, of all places), my collection of Star Wars toys never grew much in the early 1980s. I remember being jealous of kids with the huge Millennium Falcon, plastic light sabers and the towering (to me) Death Star Space Station, which my "cousin" Chip had. Chip got everything. Amazingly, the Death Star Space Station only cost $18, though that's about $55 in modern dollars so, yeah, I can see why Chip had it and I didn't.

Anyway, this booklet is filled with the usual Kenner suspects of the era, plus a few surprises. Action figures include the main characters, plus Boba Fett, R5-D4, Hammerhead, and the Power Droid, which was oddly one of my favorites over years of play. Sets include the Creature Cantina and the Droid Factory. There are also jigsaw puzzles and the obligatory plastic pistols and laser rifles.

Here's a closer look at a few toys from the page at the top of the post...

Dip Dots Star Wars Painting Set. "DIP DOTS provide the color and STAR WARS the action. New set features sixteen 8½" x 11" scenes based on STAR WARS movie with all the STAR WARS stars in action. Complete, ready-to-paint, with 8 colors of DIP DOTS instant water colors in non-spill plastic tray; STAR WARS scenes in bound book and brush. Ages 3 to 8."

Movie Viewer. "Now kids can see STAR WARS movies with their very own viewer! Exciting scenes of STARS WARS action. Crank fast or slow. The super-8 film never tangles! No batteries needed."

So, it was basically the Fisher Price Movie Viewer, which was one of my favorite childhood toys, even though I never actually had one. The Toy Box website (thetoybox1138.blogspot.com) has a nice history of this viewer, which was only produced from 1975 to 1979. Here's an excerpt of the section about Star Wars:

"These days it's relatively unheard of to have access to a film (legally) while it's still running in the theater, so when Kenner released one of its first products based on the film, kids and adults went nuts. Despite being only sixty seconds of footage, fans of the film were eager to see anything and everything they could over and over and over again. What better way then in the palm of your hand? Despite its major popularity, Kenner only produced four individually packaged cassettes, and the fifth, May The Force Be With You, which came packaged with the Viewer. There's no real answer known to the general public as to why there were so few cassettes, but we speculate that when the film took off like it did, Lucasfilm and/or Fox pulled the plug on the cassettes to encourage people to continue to fill theater seats."

I figured these would be super-expensive now on eBay, but it looks like you can get the Kenner viewer, plus one or more Star Wars cartridges, for prices ranging from $30 to $75.

Give-A-Show Projector. "Tells the entire STAR WARS story! Complete with projector, 16 full strips — 112 color slides. Projects giant pictures up to 8' x 8' on wall or any surface. Uses 3 "D" batteries, not included."

I think that girl might be the late Heather O'Rourke, of Poltergeist fame. She was a model for numerous toy advertisements, including Barbie. But I can't find any confirmation for this specific advertisement.